I 


THE 


USELESSNESS  OF  VIVISECTION 
UPON  ANIMALS 

AS  A  METHOD  OF  SCIENTIFIC  RESEARCH. 


BY 

LAWSON    TAIT,    F.R.C.S.,    etc. 


BEAD  BEFORE  THE  BIRMINGHAM  PHILOSOPHICAL  SOCIETY 

APRIL  20,  1882,   AND  REPRINTED,   BY   PERMISSION 

FROM  THE  SOCIETY'S  TRANSACTIONS. 


PHILADELPHIA : 

THE  AMERICAN  ANn-VTVISECTION  SOCIETY. 

1883. 


{REPRINTED  FROM  THE  PROCEEDINGS  OF  TEE 
BIRMINGHAM  PHILOSOPHICAL  SOCIETY. 

VOL.  Ill,  Page  121,  etc.] 


VII. — On  the  Uselessness  of  Vivisection  upon  Animals  as  a  Method 
of  Scientific  Research. 

By  Lawson  Tait,  F.R.C.S.,  &c. 


[Read  before  the  Society,  April  20th,  1882.] 


I  need  make  no  apology  for  adopting  the  same  title  for  this 
paper  as  that  of  Mrs.  Kingsford's  article  in  the  Nineteenth  Century 
for  January  last,  because  I  had  advanced  this  plea  against  Vivi- 
section some  time  previous  to  the  appearance  of  her  contribution, 
and  the  more  I  know  of  the  question,  the  more  fully  convinced 
do  I  become  of  the  verdict  which  will  ultimately  be  passed  upon 
it,  both  by  the  public  and  by  the  medical  profession. 

I  need  not  go  into  the  general  history  of  Vivisection,  for  it 
hardly  bears  upon  the  question  to  which  I  desire  to  limit  myself; 
but  I  think  it  advisable  to  formulate  a  few  preliminary  conclusions 
before  I  come  to  my  immediate  subject,  in  order  that  I  may  clear 
the  way  for  discussion,  and  show  at  once  the  grounds  upon  which 
I  stand,  for  I  find  myself  in  a  position  adverse  to  the  view  adopted 
by  the  great  majority  of  my  professional  brethren. 

I  dismiss  at  once  the  employment  of  experiments  on  living 
animals  for  the  purpose  of  mere  instruction  as  absolutely  unneces- 
sary, and  to  be  put  an  end  to  by  legislation  without  any  kind  of 


4  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham,. 

reserve  whatever.  In  my  own  education  I  went  through  the  most 
complete  course  of  instruction  in  the  University  of  Edinburgh 
without  ever  witnessing  a  single  experiment  on  a  living  animal. 
It  has  been  my  duty  as  a  teacher  to  keep  myself  closely  conver- 
sant with  the  progress  of  physiology  until  within  the  last  four 
years,  and  up  to  that  date  I  remained  perfectly  ignorant  of  any 
necessity  for  vivisection  as  a  means  of  instructing  pupils,  and  I 
can  find  no  reason  whatever  for  its  introduction  into  English 
schools,  save  a  desire  for  imitating  what  has  been  witnessed  on 
the  Continent  by  some  of  our  most  recent  additions  to  physio- 
logical teaching.  In  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  the  practice  has 
been  wholly  prevented,  and  on  a  recent  visit  to  that  institution  I 
could  not  find,  after  much  careful  inquiry,  the  slightest  reason  to 
believe  that  any  detriment  was  being  inflicted  upon  the  teaching 
or  upon  those  taught. 

The  position  of  vivisection  as  a  method  of  scientific  research 
stands  alone  amongst  the  inBnite  variety  of  roads  for  the  discovery 
of  Nature's  secrets  as  being  open  to  strong  prima  facie  objection. 
No  one  can  urge  the  slightest  ground  of  objection  against  the 
astronomer,  the  chemist,  the  electrician,  or  the  geologist  in  their 
ways  of  working;  and  the  great  commendation  of  all  other  workers 
is  the  comparative  certainty  of  their  results.  But  for  the  physi- 
ologist, working  upon  a  living  animal,  there  are  the  two  strong 
objections :  that  he  is  violating  a  strong  and  widespread  public 
sentiment,  and  that  he  tabulates  results  of  the  most  uncertain  and 
often  quite  contradictory  kind. 

I  do  not  propose  to  deal  with  the  sentimental  side  of  the 
question  at  all,  though  no  one  can  doubt  it  is  a  very  strong  element 
in  the  case  as  maintained  by  public  opinion,  but  I  must  point  out 
that  there  are  four  avenues  of  thought  by  which  this  aspect  of  the 
case  is  almost  unconsciously  traversed,  and  which  are  to  be  sepa- 
rated from  it  only  by  arbitrary  divisions. 

The  first  is  the  avenue  of  pure  abstract  moralitjr,  by  which  it 
is  argued  that  we  have  no  right  to  inflict  sufferings  on  others  that 
we  ourselves  may  benefit,  an  avenue  which  is  worthy  of  the  highest 
respect,  because  its  opening  up  is  only  a  matter  of  yesterday  in 
the  evolution  of  the  moral  life  of  individuals,  and  as  far  as  national 
morality  is  concerned  it  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  been  ever 
seriously  considered  until  about  a  year  ago. 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  5 

The  second  may  be  called  a  political  avenue,  and  is  also  one 
of  importance,  though  that  importance  is  not  visible  at  first  sight, 
and  may  even  be  altogether  denied  by  some  of  a  particular  shade 
of  political  conviction.  But  to  those  of  us  who  regard  the  Game 
Laws  as  a  prolific  method  of  manufacturing  criminals,  of  wasting 
public  money,  of  preventing  the  development  of  agricultural 
industry,  and  hindering  the  development  of  the  peasant  from  his 
present  serfdom  to  his  possible  and  perfect  citizenship,  this  avenue 
assumes  a  mighty  importance  when  we  discover  that  the  lay  sup- 
port of  vivisection  is  derived  mainly  from  those  who  maintain 
costly  pheasant  preserves  in  order  to  become  amateur  poultry 
butchers,  and  who  maim  pigeons  at  Hurlingham  under  the  idea 
that  it  is  amusement. 

Any  one,  therefore,  who  objects  to  the  Game  Laws  from 
political  conviction,  will  put  vivisection  upon  its  trial,  and  he  must 
hear  a  good  case  before  he  consents  to  an  acquittal. 

The  third  avenue  is  the  religious  one,  and  it  is  a  road  many 
are  traveling,  upon  very  different  errands,  and  with  very  different 
convictions.     I  must  content  myself  with  pointing  out  that  the 
doctrine  of  evolution  has  affected  religion  as  it  has  everything 
else,  if  indeed  it  is  not  establishing  an  altogether  new  form,  of ' 
faith,  which  is  making  an  unrecognized,  certainly  an  unmeasured, . 
progress  amongst  us.    Admitting  that  the  so-called  lower  animals  ■ 
are  part  of  ourselves,  in  being  of  one  scheme  and  differing  from 
us  only  in  degree,  no  matter  how  they  be  considered,  is  to  admit 
they  have  equal  rights.     These  rights  are  in  no  case  to  be  hastily 
and  unfairly  set  aside,  but  should  be  all  the  more  tenderly  dealt 
with  in  that  civilization  and  inventions  are  every  day  making  it 
more  and  more  difficult  for  the  animals  to  assert  their  independ- 
ence, or  as  it  were  to  vote  upon  the  question. 

There  remains,  therefore,  the  fourth  avenue,  which  simply 
amounts  to  the  inquiry,  Has  this  method  of  scientific  research — 
vivisection — contributed  so  much  to  the  relief  of  suffering  or  to 
the  advance  of  human  knowledge  as  to  justify  its  continuance  in 
spite  of  the  manifest  objections  to  it?  My  own  answer  I  shall 
try  to  give  in  the  following  pages,  merely  premising  that  an  answer 
to  justify  vivisection  must  be  clear  and  decisive,  must  be  free 
from  doubt  of  any  kind,  and  above  all,  it  must  not  assume  the 
protection  of  a  "privileged  mystery."    This  is  a  question,  I  main- 


6  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

tain,  which  can  be  discussed  by  an  educated  layman  just  as  well, 
perhaps  better,  than  by  a  physician  or  a  surgeon  or  a  professional 
phj'siologist.  It  is  a  question  chiefly  of  historical  criticism,  and 
we  must  have  a  conclusive  answer  concerning  each  advance  which 
is  quoted  as  an  instance,  how  much  of  it  has  been  due  to  vivisec- 
tional  experiment  and  how  much  to  other  sources,  and  this  amount 
must  be  clearly  and  accurately  ascertained.  It  will  not  do,  as  has 
been  the  case  in  many  of  the  arguments,  to  draw  such  a  picture 
as  that  of  an  amputation  in  the  seventeenth  century  and  one  per- 
formed last  year,  and  say  that  the  change  is  due  to  vivisection. 
We  might  just  as  well  point  to  the  prisons  of  the  Inquisition  and 
then  to  one  of  our  present  convict  establishments  and  claim  all 
the  credit  of  the  change  for  the  fact  that  our  judges  wear  wigs.. 
The  real  questions  are:  What  advances  in  detail  are  due  to  vivi- 
section ?  Could  these  advances  have  been  made  without  vivisec- 
tion ?  If  vivisection  was  necessary  for  elementary  and  primitive 
research,  is  it  any  longer  necessary,  seeing  that  we  have  such 
splendid  and  rapidly-developing  methods  in  hundreds  of  other 
directions  ?  Have  we  made  complete  and  exhaustive  use  of  all 
other  available  methods,  not  open  to  objection  ?  And  finally,  are 
the  advances  based  upon  vivisection  of  animals  capable  of  being 
adapted  conclusively  for  mankind,  for  whose  benefit  they  are  pro- 
fessedly made  ? 

It  must  be  perfectly  clear  that  to  answer  all  these  questions, 
specific  instances  must  be  given,  and  that  they  must  be  analyzed 
historically  with  great  care.  This  has  alread}7  been  done  in  many 
instances,  and  I  am  bound  to  say  in  every  case  known  to  me,  to 
the  utter  disestablishment  of  the  claims  of  vivisection. 

Take  the  case  of  the  alleged  discovery  of  the  circulation  of 
the  blood  by  Harvey,  and  it  can  be  clearly  shown  that  quite  as 
much  as  Harvey  knew  was  known  before  his  time,  and  that  it  is 
only  our  insular  pride  which  has  claimed  for  him  the  merit  of  the 
discovery.  That  he  made  any  solid  contribution  to  the  facts  of 
the  case  by  vivisection  is  conclusively  disproved,  and  this  was 
practically  admitted  before  the  Commission  by  such  good  author- 
ities as  Dr.  Acland  and  Dr.  Lauder  Brunton.  The  circulation  was 
not  proved  till  Malpighi  used  the  microscope,  and  though  in  that 
observation  he  used  a  vivisectional  experiment  his  proceeding  was 
wholly  unnecessary,  for  he  could  have  better  and  more  easily  have 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  ? 

used  the  web  of  the  frog's  foot  than  its  lung.  It  is,  moreover 
perfectly  clear,  that  were  it  incumbent  on  any  one  to  prove  the 
circulation  of  the  blood  now  as  a  new  theme,  it  could  not  be  done 
by  any  vivisectional  process,  but  could  at  once  be  satisfactorily 
established  by  a  dead  body  and  an  injecting  syringe.  In  fact,  I 
think  I  might  almost  say  that  the  systemic  circulation  remained 
incompletely  proved  until  the  examination  of  injected  tissues  by 
the  microscope  had  been  made. 

But  supposing  we  grant,  for  the  sake  of  argument,  that  such 
an  important  discovery  had  been  made  by  vivisection  and  by  it 
alone,  there  still  remains  the  all-important  question,  is  it  necessary 
to  use  such  mediaeval  methods  for  modern  research  ?  No  one  can 
doubt  that  the  rude  methods  employed  in  Charles  II's  reign  for 
obtaining  evidence — the  rack,  the  boot,  the  thumb-screw,  and  the 
burning  match — were  occasionally  the  means  of  accomplishing 
the  ends  of  justice,  but  need  we  go  back  to  them  now  ?  The  very 
necessity  for  ending  them  brought  into  use  fresh  and  far  less 
fallible  methods,  and  I  am  inclined  to  make  the  claim  for  physi- 
ology, pathology,  and  the  practice  of  medicine  and  surgery  that 
the  very  retention  of  this  cruel  method  of  research  is  hindering 
real  progress,  that  if  it  were  utterly  stopped,  the  result  would 
certainly  be  the  search  for,  and  the  finding  of,  far  better  and  more 
certain  means  of  discovery.  To  urge  its  continuance  on  the  ground 
that  it  was  useful  in  the  seventeenth  century  is  just  as  reasonable 
as  to  ask  the  astronomer  to  go  back  to  the  cumbrous  tackle  by 
which  Huyghens  first  worked  his  lenses. 

If  the  method  of  obtaining  evidence  by  torture  was  occa- 
sionally successful,  there  can  be  little  doubt  that  as  a  rule  it  failed 
and  led  the  inquirers  astra}'.  So  I  say  it  has  been  with  vivisec- 
tion as  a  method  of  research,  it  has  constantly  led  those  who  have 
employed  it  into  altogether  erroneous  conclusions,  and  the  records 
teem  with  instances  in  which  not  only  have  animals  been  fruitlessly 
sacrificed,  but  human  lives  have  been  added  to  the  list  of  victims 
by  reason  of  its  false  light. 

Those  who  have  recently  advocated  vivisection  seem  to  have 
forgotten  or  to  have  ignored  this  most  fatal  objection,  and  as  a 
rule  they  have  indulged  in  a  line  of  argument  which  is  little  more 
than  assertion.  For  the  purpose  of  this  paper  I  have  gone  care- 
fully over  a  large  mass  of  literature  upon  the  subject,  and  find 


8  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

that  the  hulk  of  it  is  altogether  beyond  criticism,  because  it  dees 
not  deal  with  fact.  Thus  in  a  recent  address  on  the  subject  by 
Professor  Humphrey,  of  Cambridge,  there  is  a  long  list  of  advances 
in  medicine  and  surgery,  every  one  of  which  is  attributed  to  vivi- 
section solely  because  some  experiments  were  mixed  up  in  the 
history  of  each  instance  ;  but  not  an  effort  was  made  to  show  that 
the  advances  were  due  to  vivisection.  The  proper  method  for  the 
discussion  of  this  subject  is  to  take  up  a  number  of  special  instances 
and  to  subject  them  to  careful  criticism,  chiefly  by  historical  evi- 
dence, and  as  soon  as  the  advocates  of  vivisection  do  this  success- 
fully, I  am  prepared  to  grant  their  case.  But  hitherto  they  have 
failed. 

Serial  literature  during  the  last  few  months  has  been  singu- 
larly fertile  in  articles  on  the  question  of  vivisection,  and  one 
commanding  attention  as  an  editorial  is  to  be  found  in  Nature  of 
March  9th. 

There  the  a  priori  argument  for  vivisection  is  put  in  the 
familiar  illustration  that  "  it  would  be  more  reasonable  to  hope  to 
make  out  the  machinery  of  a  watch  by  looking  at  it,  than  to  hope 
to  understand  the  mechanism  of  a  living  animal  by  mere  contem- 
plation." Unfortunately  there  is  a  fault  in  the  analogy,  and  it 
may  be  far  more  truly  put  in  the  converse,  than  it  would  be  wholly 
impossible  to  repair  the  damaged  movements  of  a  watch  by  experi- 
menting with  an  upright  pendulum  clock.  There  is  a  perfectly 
parallel  dissimilarity  between  the  functions  and  the  diseases  of 
animals  and  those  of  man. 

In  the  same  article  is  a  quotation  from  the  article  of  Sir 
William  Gull,  to  the  effect  that  the  experiments  of  Bernard,  in 
baking  living  dogs  to  death  in  an  oven,  have  opened  the  way  to 
our  understanding  the  pathology  of  fever.  In  zymotic  diseases 
the  elevated  temperature  is  not  a  cause  of  the  disease,  but  its 
consequence,  and  the  answer  to  the  argument  is  that  not  a  single 
contribution  of  any  kind  has  yet  been  made  to  the  cure  of  scarlet 
fever.  Its  course  cannot  be  shortened  by  one  hour.  Medicine 
is  powerless  for  the  cure  of  zymotics,  whilst  hygiene  is  all-powerful 
in  their  prevention,  and  the  medicine  of  the  future  lies  wholly  in 
this  direction.  Drugs  are  impotent,  but  sanitary  laws  can  and 
will  banish  all  these  diseases,  when  they  are  completely  understood 
and  fulfilled. 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  9 

The  article  continues  that  "between  1864  and  1867,  seven  new 
drugs  were  added  to  the  Pharmacopoeia,  of  which  at  least  the  two 
most  useful,  carbolic  acid  and  plvvsostigma,  are  due  to  vivisec- 
tion." Upon  the  question  of  new  drugs  I  can  speak  only  with 
great  reserve,  for  such  a  wholesome  skepticism  concerning  drugs 
has  been  introduced  by  the  medical  schism  of  homoeopathy,  that 
I  look  upon  all  new  drugs  with  great  suspicion.  Sir  William 
Gull  himself  says  he  has  not  much  belief  in  drugs.  I  fear  most 
new  drugs  do  more  harm  than  good  ;  some  of  them,  such  as 
chloral,  most  certainly  have  done  so.  I  cannot  learn  that  physos- 
tigma  is  of  any  practical  service,  and  I  have  shown  in  my  pub- 
lished writings  that  carbolic  acid  has  done  far  more  harm  than 
good.  Perhaps  it  would  have  been  better  if  we  had  never  heard 
of  it.  The  question  of  the  investigation  of  the  actions  of  drugs 
by  experiments  on  animals  I  have  to  confess  is  a  very  difficult 
one,  because  after  we  have  found  out  what  they  do  in  one  animal 
we  find  that  in  another  the  results  are  wholly  different,  and  the 
process  of  investigation  has  to  be  repeated  in  man.  Not  only  so, 
but  in  human  individuals  the  actions  of  drugs,  in  very  many  cases 
vary  so  much;  that  each  fresh  patient  may  form  really  a  new 
research.  Pharmacy  forms,  therefore,  at  least,  a  very  shaky 
argument  for  vivisection. 

Finally,  the  Editor  of  Nature  deals  with  the  argument  of 
proportion,  which  is  stated  to  the  effect  that  the  proportion  of 
pain  inflicted  by  vivisection  bears  but  small  ratio  to  the  pain 
relieved  by  the  discoveries  effected  in  that  way.  But  if  this 
question  be  examined  historically,  as  it  must  be  for  the  sake  of 
justness,  it  will  be  found  that  the  argument  is  all  the  other  way. 
To  take  the  case  of  Ferrier's  experiments,  if  the  history  of  the 
point  be  examined,  even  from  the  period  of  Saucerotte  till  now, 
the  number  of  experiments  recorded  is  perfectly  awful,  and  we 
can  easily  imagine  that  many  more  were  performed  and  not  put 
on  record.  Concerning  the  arteries  this  is  still  more  true ;  and 
it  is,  to  say  the  least  of  it,  very  doubtful  if  any  permanent  good 
has  been  done  by  them.  What  we  do  really  know  about  both  of 
these  matters  with  certainty  has  been  derived  from  the  post- 
mortem examinations  of  our  failures  in  human  subjects,  and  not 
from  vivisection  experiments. 

In  a  work  published  within  the  last  few  weeks  by  a  distin- 


10  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

guished  member  of  this  Society,  Dr.  George  Gore,  entitled  "  The 
Scientific  Basis  of  National  Progress,"  and  at  p.  80,  will  be  found 
the  following  sentence :  "  The  Antivivisection  movement  is  but 
one  of  the  phases  of  the  ever-existing  conflict  between  the 
advancing  and  retarding  sections  of  mankind." 

I  do  not  know  whether  I  belong  to  the  antivivisection  move- 
ment or  not,  but  I  certainly  cannot  rank  myself  with  those  who 
attribute  to  vivisection  the  merit  which  distinctly  belongs  to  other 
causes.     So  far  I  am  an  antivivisectionist  most  thoroughly. 

Similarly  I  do  not  know  whether  or  not  I  am  to  be  regarded 
as  belonging  to  the  "  retarding  section  of  mankind."  If  I  am  so 
classed,  I  fear  I  shall  be  in  company  as  strange  to  me  as  I  shall 
be  objectionable  to  it.  But  my  relief  is  great  as  I  read  further  in 
Dr.  Gore's  book  and  see  upon  what  grounds  he  has  built  his  con- 
clusion. I  have  never  heard  that  Dr.  Gore  has  conducted  any 
vivisection  research  himself,  and  therefore  I  assumed  that  he  took 
his  argument  from  some  other  source.  He  was  kind  enough  to 
give  me  his  reference  for  the  following  statement,  which  he  makes 
at  page  81 :  "  Ferrier's  comparatively  recent  vivisection  experi- 
ments have  already  enabled  medical  men  to  treat  more  success- 
fully those  formidable  diseases,  epilepsy  and  abscess  of  the 
brain."  His  authority  is  an  anonymous  article  in  the  British 
Medical  Journal  of  November  19th,  1881,  in  which  a  series  of  cases 
is  given  in  support  of  this  extraordinary  statement.  The  purport 
of  it  is  that  the  experiments  of  Ferrier  have  led  to  greater  cer- 
tainty in  applying  the  trephine  for  the  removal  of  depressed 
fractures,  etc.,  which  had  produced  serious  symptoms,  or  for  the 
relief  of  matter  in  cerebral  abscesses. 

I  do  not  propose  now  to  go  into  this  very  wide  and  difficult 
question,  because  I  shall  have  a  fuller  opportunity  on  another 
occasion.  I  shall  only  say  that  Ferrier's  first  experiments  were 
published  in  1873,  and  that  previous  to  that  time  a  large  number 
of  cases  are  on  record  where  the  seat  of  injury  was  ascertained 
with  perfect  accuracy  by  simpler  and  less  misleading  methods — 
in  one  case  by  myself  in  1868.  The  a  priori  difficulties  in  the 
application  of  Ferrier's  conclusions  are  enormous  and,  as  it  seems 
to  me,  insuperable  ;  and,  after  a  most  careful  historical  considera- 
tion of  the  illustration  quoted  by  Dr.  Gore,  my  verdict  is  most 
decidedly  that  of  not  proven. 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  11 

The  application  of  the  trephine  for  the  treatment  of  epilepsy 
is  of  course  absolutely  limited  to  cases  where  the  disease  is  the 
result  of  injury  to  the  skull.  No  one  has  ever  dreamed  of  apply- 
ing it  to  other  cases.  I  find  that  the  first  operation  of  this  kind 
was  performed  in  IT 05,  by  Guillaume  Mau quest  de  la  Motte  with 
partial  success,  and  it  was  repeated  with  complete  success  by  Mr. 
Birch  of  St.  Thomas's  Hospital,  1804.  Between  1804  and  1865 
there  are  50  cases  on  record  (collected  by  Dr.  James  Russell, 
British  Medical  Journal,  1865),  and  of  these  44  recovered,  the 
results  being  satisfactory  in  39  of  them.  This  paper  of  Dr.  Rus- 
sell's was  published  years  before  any  of  Ferrier's  experiments 
were  undertaken,  and  the  results  of  trephining  for  epilepsy  pub- 
lished since  are  not  so  good  as  those  published  by  Dr.  Russell. 
The  most  recent  contribution  to  the  subject  is  a  paper  by  Mr.  J. 
F.  West,  who  asks  the  question  "  Are  our  indications  in  any  given 
case,  either  of  paralysis  or  epilepsy,  sufficiently  precise  and  well- 
marked  to  warrant  us  in  recommending  the  use  of  the  trephine 
at  a  particular  point  of  the  skull?  "  and  he  answers  it  thus  :  "  It 
will  be  a  long  time  before  it  is  definitehv  settled,  but  such  cases 
as  those  alluded  to  give  encouragement."  This  answer  of  a  prac- 
tical surgeon  is  very  different  from  that  of  Dr.  Gore. 

Even  if  the  conclusions  which  are  attributed  to  Dr.  Ferrier's 
researches  were  to  be  regarded  as  indisputable,  my  answer  would 
be  that  they  might  have  been  arrived  at,  and  certainly  would  soon 
be  enormously  extended,  if  our  clinical  research  were  conducted 
upon  reasonable  and  scientific  principles.  The  chief  reason  of  the 
slow  advance  of  the  arts  of  medicine  and  surgery  is  the  reckless 
waste  of  the  material  so  plentifully  supplied  by  disease,  and  the 
first  remedy  will  consist  in  the  subdivision  of  the  labor,  a  remedy 
agaiust  which,  unfortunately,  the  medical  profession  protests  most 
vigorously. 

It  is  of  course  perfectly  impossible  to  deal  with  all  of  the 
illustrations  in  favor  of  vivisection  which  have  recently  been 
advanced  in  the  limits  of  an  ordinary  paper,  and  I  prefer  to  take 
those  which  deal  with  points  of  practical  utility,  rather  than  with 
such  as  have  as  yet  only  a  possibility  of  being  useful  in  the  future. 
I  shall  deal,  therefore,  at  present  chiefly  with  the  illustrations 
which  have  been  gathered  from  the  field  of  practical  medicine  and 
surgery,  for  in  them,  of  course,  the  public  see  the  strongest  argu- 


12  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

ments.  If  it  is  publicly  announced,  as  has  been  done  of  late  very 
widely,  that  human  diseases  have  been  cured  and  human  suffering- 
lessened  by  experiments  on  the  lower  animals,  the  public  must 
therein  see  a  strong  argument  for  vivisection.  But  such  announce- 
ments are  open  to  the  test  of  historical  examination,  and  to  this  I 
propose  to  subject  the  most  important  of  them.  I  am  equally 
open  to  discuss  in  the  same  way  those  points  of  less  apparent 
usefulness,  the  matters  of  mere  physiological  discovery,  on  some 
future  occasion,  if  it  should  arise ;  but,  as  with  these,  the  only 
defence  can  be,  that  some  day  they  m^y  prove  of  service,  it  is 
clearly  best  to  deal  first  with  those  for  which  an  actual  and  not 
merely  a  potential  utility  is  claimed. 

Those  of  my  professional  brethren  who  take  the  other  side 
may  probably  complain  that  I  have  selected  a  lay  audience  for  the 
discussion ;  but  the  answer  is,  that  by  the  circulation  of  pam- 
phlets, and  by  communicated  paragraphs  in  newspapers,  they  have 
already  taken  the  initiative,  and  I  am  but  meeting  them  on  their 
own  ground. 

I  am  quite  well  aware  that  I  am  one  of  a  small  minority  of 
my  profession  in  my  view  that  vivisection  is  useless  as  a  method 
of  research,  but  the  answer  I  am  disposed  to  offer  on  tins  point  is, 
that  not  one  in  a  hundred  of  ruy  professional  brethren  have  ever 
seriousl}'  examined  the  question.  Ninety-nine  take  for  granted 
the  statements  of  the  hundredth,  and  he,  in  turn,  has  not  gone 
into  the  matter  upon  that  side  from  which  alone  a'  safe  answer  can 
be  given — that  of  historical  criticism. 

The  dispute,  as  I  have  already  said,  is  not  to  be  settled  by 
mere  statement  of  opinion,  one  way  or  the  other ;  nor  is  it  a 
question  of  authority.  On  the  argument  of  authority  a  very 
singular  answer  has  been  given  by  the  supporters  of  vivisection 
in  the  case  of  the  late  Sir  William  Fergusson,  who  stated  in  his 
evidence  before  the  Ro^al  Commission  that  in  his  opinion  nothing 
had  been  gained  for  surgery  by  experiments  on  the  lower  ani- 
mals— an  opinion  which  I  entirely  endorse.  During  his  lifetime, 
Sir  William  Fergusson  had  heaped  upon  him  all  the  distinctions 
which  his  Queen,  his  country  and  his  profession  had  it  in  their 
power  to  bestow.  He  was  the  titular  head  of  his  profession,  its 
most  successful  operator,  one  of  its  greatest  anatomists,  its  most 
widely  employed  practitioner,  its  most  successful  teacher,  the 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  13 

author  of  its  principal  text-book  on  surgery — but  now,  when  he 
is  dead,  we  are  told  he  was  not  a  scientific  surgeon,  because  he 
did  not  believe  in  vivisection.  Nobody  said  this  in  his  lifetime, 
and  so  late  as  1813  he  was  elected  President  of  the  British  Medical 
Association,  over  all  the  profoundly  scientific  surgeons  of  the 
Metropolis.  I  share  Sir  William's  opinions  concerning  vivisection, 
and  I  am  quite  content  to  rank  with  him  on  that  account  as  an 
unscientific  surgeon. 

A  pamphlet  has  recently  been  published  in  this  town  on 
"  The  Influence  of  Vivisection  on  Human  Surgery,"  by  Mr. 
Sampson  Gamgee,  in  which  the  proposition  is  set  forth  that  without 
experiments  on  living  animals  "  scientific  surgery  could  not  have 
been  founded,  and  its  present  humane  and  safe  practice  would 
have  been  impossible."  Mr.  Gamgee  supports  this  proposition 
by  a  series  of  instances  which  we  may  presume  are  the  best  and 
strongest  he  could  find.  These  I  tabulate  as  follows,  and  I  shall 
discuss  them  historically  in  this  order. 

I.  Treatment  of  injuries  of  the  head,  and  the  theory 
of  Contre-coup. 
II.  Amputation  of  the  Hip-joint. 

III.  Paracentesis  Thoracis. 

IV.  Subcutaneous  Tenotomy 

Y.  Treatment  of  Aneurism,  Ligature,  and  Torsion  of 
Arteries. 
YI.  Transfusion. 
YII.  Abdominal  Surgery. 
VIII.  Function  of  Periosteum. 
IX.  The  Ecraseur. 
X.  Detection  of  Poison. 

Mr.  Gamgee  tells  us  that  the  Academie  de  Chirurgie  gave  out 
the  subject  of  contre-coup  and  its  influence  in  injuries  of  the  head 
as  the  subject  for  a  prize  competition,  and  that  the  prize  was 
obtained  in  1118  by  M.  Saucerotte,  whose  essay  was  based  "on 
literary  research,  clinical  observations,  and  twenty-one  experi- 
ments on  living  dogs."  *     He  omits,  however,  to  make  any  esti- 

*  Memoire  sur  les  Contre-coups  dans  les  lesions  de  la  Tete,  par  M. 
Saucerotte  (Couronne  en  1768),  Mem.  Acad,  de  Chirurgie,  torn,  x,  327, 

et  seq. 


14  Philosojrfiical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

mate  of  the  value  of  the  experiments  on  the  dogs,  which  seems 
to  me  to  be  absolutely  nothing ;  and  he  quite  forgets  to  mention 
that  the  theory  of  contre-coup  had  been  completely  established 
for  nearly  two  centuries  before,  and  had  been  particularly  the  sub- 
ject of  Paul  Ammannus,  of  Leipsic,  who  wrote  a  well-known  work, 
"  De  resonitu  seu  contra  flssura  cranii,"  in  1674,  in  which  trepan- 
ning is  recommended  at  the  point  of  contre-coup,  as  had  been 
practiced  by  Paul  Barbette,  of  Amsterdam,  thirteen  years  before 
that.  The  theory  of  contre-coup,  and  the  fatal  practices  arising 
from  it,  are  happily  now  buried  in  oblivion,  in  spite  of  Saucerotte's 
vivisection,  and  would  never  again  have  been  alluded  to,  but  for 
Mr.  Gaingee's  unfortunate  resurrection  of  them. 

The  modern  verdict  concerning  fractures  of  the  skull  is  given 
tersely  in  Mr.  Flint  South's  words,  ''the  less  done  as  regards 
meddling  with  them  the  better,"  and  "a  knowledge  of  counter 
fractures  is  quite  uncertain."  In  fact  nothing  could  be  more 
unfortunate  than  the  selection  of  M.  Saucerotte's  experiments  as 
an  illustration  of  the  value  of  vivisection,  for  they  were  performed 
for  a  purpose  which  was  long  ago  recognized  as  futile,  and  in 
support  of  a  practice  universally  condemned. 

M.  Saucerotte  says— "Pour  etablir  le  diagnostic  des  lesions 
des  differentes  parties  du  viscere, j'ai  cru  devoir  prendre  la  voie 
de  l'experience  et  de  1 'observation.  Ce  ne  sont  point  ici  des  con- 
sequences hasardees,  ce  sont  les  resultats  de  faits  penible,  que 
formeront,  a  ce  que  j'espere  un  foyer  lumineitx,  dont  les  ra}Tons 
repondront  le  plus  grand  'jour  sur  la  pratique."  He  anticipated 
many  of  Ferrier's  experiments  by  more  than  a  hundred  3Tears,  and 
when  he  trephined  the  skulls  of  dogs  and  injured  their  brains  on 
the  right  side,  he  found  that  they  became  somewhat  feeble  on  their 
left  sides,  and  vice  versa,  a  fact  that  had  been  established  by 
pathology  long  before.  His  idea  of  imitating  the  injury  of  contre- 
coup,  was  to  pass  a  knife  right  through  the  substance  of  the  brain, 
till  it  impinged  on  the  inner  surface  of  the  skull  opposite  the 
trephine  hole,  a  most  absurd  experiment,  as  the  contre-coup 
injures  at  the  opposite  surface  only,  and  not  necessarily  at  all  the 
intervening  brain  substance. 

Reading  his  experiments,  the}r  seem  so  like  Ferrier's  that  I 
fancy  if  Dr.  Ferrier  had  known  of  the  existence  of  this  essay  he 
would  have  found  little  need  to  repeat  its  work. 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  15 

Many  of  the  conclusions  of  Saucerotte's  experiments  are 
eminently  absurd,  and,  save  that  of  the  decussation  of  the  fibres, 
which  was  known  before,  I  can  find  few  that  have  been  since 
accepted,  and  those  that  have  been  he  candidly  avows  were  pre- 
viously observed  in  cases  of  disease.  Finally,  the  conclusions 
concerning  treatment  of  injuries  of  the  head  which  he  draws  from 
his  experiments  are  not  such  as  would  be  listened  to  in  modern 
surgery,  and  it  is  cei'tain  that  if  they  were  ever  acted  upon  they 
must  have  had  results  almost  uniformly  disastrous. 

The  fact  is,  that  the  whole  run  of  vivisectional  experiments 
on  the  brains  of  animals,  now  extending  over  hundreds  of  years, 
have  given  no  sort  of  assistance  to  the  elucidation  of  the  physi- 
ology of  that  wonderful  organ,  so  contradictory  have  been  the 
results.  On  this  subject  Dr.  W.  B.  Carpenter,  who  curiously 
enough  has  recently  appeared  as  an  ardent  supporter  of  vivisection, 
says,  in  the  seventh  edition  of  his  standard  work  on  the  "  Prin- 
ciples of  Human  Physiology,"  p.  645,  "  The  results  of  partial 
mutilations  are  usually  in  the  first  instance  a  general  disturbance 
of  the  cerebral  functions  ;  which  subsequently,  however,  more  or 
less  quickly  subsides,  leaving  but  little  apparent  affection  of  the 
animal  functions,  except  muscular  weakness.  The  whole  of  one 
hemisphere  has  been  removed  in  this  way,  without  any  evident 
consequence,  save  a  temporary  feebleness  of  the  limbs  on  the 
opposite  side  of  the  body,  and  what  was  supposed  to  be  a  defi- 
ciency of  sight  through  the  opposite  eye.  *  *  *  So  far  as 
any  inferences  can  be  safely  drawn  from  them  these  experiments 
fully  bear  out  the  conclusion  that  the  cerebrum  is  the  organ  of 
Intelligence,"  a  conclusion  which  surely  has  never  been  doubted, 
since  it  was  first  the  object  of  the  then  savage  club  to  destroy  the 
intelligence  of  a  foe  by  cracking  his  skull.  Continuing  his 
researches  on  such  experiments  as  those  of  Saucerotte  and  Ferrier, 
Dr!  Carpenter  tersely  sums  up  the  prima  facie  objections  to  them, 
objections  which  seem  to  him,  as  they  seem  to  me,  to  be  fatal  to 
their  utility  :  "It  is  obvious  that  much  of  the  disturbance  of  the 
sensorial  powers  which  is  occasioned  by  this  operation  is  fairly 
attributable  to  the  laying  open  of  the  cranial  cavity,  to  the  dis- 
turbance of  the  normal  vascular  pressure,  and  to  the  injury 
necessarily  done  to  the  parts  which  are  left  by  their  severance 
from  the  cerebellum."     Dr.  Marshall  Hall  also  pointed  out  long 


16  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham, 

ago  that  injury  to  the  dura-mater  is  an  important  factor  in  the 
results  obtained. 

II. — Amputation  of  the  Hip  Joint. 

At  page  8  of  his  pamphlet,  Mr.  Gamgee  makes  the  astonishing 
statement  that  this  operation  was  only  attempted  after  it  was  proved 
safe  by  vivisection.  The  authority  he  has  been  kind  enough  to 
give  me  for  this  is  a  brief  sentence  in  the  preface  to  the  ninth 
volume  of  the  u  Memoires  de  PAcademie  de  Chirurgie,"  written 
by  the  Secretary  General  and  published  in  1*7 "78. 

But  the  first  hint  we  get  of  amputation  of  the  hip-joint  is 
from  a  German  surgeon  named  Vohler,  who  was  in  practice  about 
1690.  It  is  doubtful  if  he  ever  performed  it  on  a  living  patient, 
but  it  is  on  record  that  he  tried  on  the  dead  body.  But  it  was 
performed  by  M.  la  Croix,  of  Orleans,  in  1*748,  not  only  on  one 
limb,  but  on  both  limbs  of  the  same  patient,  the  first  operation 
being  successful,  and  the  second  almost  so.  This  was  nearly  thirty 
years  before  the  publication  of  the  vivisection  of  dogs ;  and  there 
are  many  other  cases  of  success  previous  to  Mr.  Gamgee's  alleged 
origin  of  the  operation,  one  being  by  the  celebrated  Ker  of  North- 
ampton, in  1*773  ;  and  as  Mr.  Gamgee  has  published  a  large  book 
on  amputation  of  the  hip-joint,  it  is  surprising  that  he  did  not 
know  something  more  about  the  history  cf  the  operation. 

III. — Paracentesis  Thoracis. 

Mr.  Gamgee  makes  another  most  unfortunate  selection  in  the 
case  of  William  Hewson,  who  based  a  theoretical  operation  for 
pneumothorax  upon  experiments  on  living  dogs  and  rabbits  so 
long  ago  as  1769.  He  made  a  wound  in  the  side  of  the  chest  and 
admitted  air  into  the  pleura,  where  no  air  ought  to  be,  and  then 
he  operated  to  get  it  out  again.  When  such  a  condition  is  brought 
about  in  man,  and  no  vital  organ  seriously  injured,  the  patient 
gets  perfectly  well  without  any  operation.  I  cannot  learn  that 
Hewson's  cperation  for  the  removal  of  air  has  ever  been  performed 
on  man.  When  pneumothorax  occurs  from  disease  it  is  generally 
associated  with  conditions  necessarily  fatal,  for  which  no  opera- 
tion is  advisable.  On  this  point  the  greatest  authority,  Dr. 
Bowditch,  of  New  York,  says,  "  I  have  operated  once  in  pneumo- 
hydrothorax,  with   temporary  relief  and   comparative  ease   for 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  17 

several  days.  Many  theoretical  objections  may  he  urged  against 
the  operation  in  such  a  case  ;  but  as  the  operation  can  do  uo  harm 
and  may  give  much  relief,  I  shall  operate  again  in  such  a  case." 
The  proceeding  is  therefore  doubtful,  the  conditions  are  extremely 
rare,  pure  pneumothorax,  such  as  Hewson  invented  his  proceed- 
ings for,  never  needs  it,  and  therefore  his  experiments  on  living 
dogs  and  rabbits  were  useless. 

Finally,  tapping  for  the  removal  of  fluid  in  the  chest  was 
practiced  long  before  Hewson's  time,  and  therefore  his  research 
was  needless.  Hewson  really  based  his  proposal  on  this  well- 
known  practice,  but  in  this  he  was  anticipated  in  the  most  favor- 
able cases — those  of  wounds — for  Anel,  of  Amsterdam,  published 
quite  the  same  proposal  in  1101,  and  it  has  been  uniformly  con- 
demned by  every  writer  on  military  surgery  since,  because  the 
removal  of  the  air  merely  induces  bleeding.*  Anel  devised  a 
syringe  for  the  purpose,  which  has  been  revived  as  the  modern 
aspirator.f  Had  Mr.  Gamgee  known  an}*thing  of  Dominic  Anel 
he  would  never  have  mentioned  William  Hewson. 

IT. — Subcutaneous  Tenotomy. 

I  have  traced  the  history  of  the  surgery  of  tendons,  and  I 
cannot  see  the  slightest  reason  to  attribute  any  of  the  advances  in 
this  department  to  the  alleged  vivisections  of  John  Hunter.  I 
cannot  find  any  record  of  these  experiments,  beyond  the  allusions 
to  them  by  Drewry  Ottley,  and  Palmer  in  his  life  of  Hunter. 

The  same  accident  which  happened  to  Hunter  in  1161  hap- 
pened to  the  first  Monro  in  1126,  and  from  the  latter  instance  a 
very  marked  advance  in  surgical  practice  was  at  once  made,  and 
a  contrivance  invented  by  Monro  himself,  for  his  own  case,  is  still 
in  use  and  goes  by  his  name.  No  such  advance  was  made  from 
Hunter's  accident  or  from  his  vivisections.  In  their  histories  of 
the  progress  of  orthopaedic  surgery,  Little  and  Adams  make  no 
such  claim  for  Hunter.  Adams  points  out  clearly,  and  with  justice, 
that  Hunter  established  the  principles  on  which  subcutaneous 
surgery  is  now  conducted ;  but  these  he  established  from  clinical 

*  Flint  Soutli's  edition  of  Chelms,  vol.  i,  p.  452. 

f  L'Art  de  Sucer  les  Plaies  sans  le  servir  de  la  boucke  d'un  homme. 
Amsterdam,  1707. 


18  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

observations,  not  from  experiments  upon  animals.  And  in  his 
lecture  on  "  Ruptural  Tendons"  (vol.  i,  p.  436),  Hunter  says  not 
one  word  about  his  vivisections,  or  any  conclusions  he  derived 
from  them  as  to  the,  method  of  repair  of  tendons.  If  he  ever 
made  any  such  experiments  he  must  have  placed  very  little  value 
upon  them. 

If  we  trace  the  development  of  tenotomy  we  find  that  Hunter's 
experiments  had  no  influence  upon  it  at  all.  They  were  performed, 
it  is  said,  in  1767.  But  the  first  tenotomy  was  not  performed  till 
1184,  by  Lorenz,  at  Frankfort,  and  then  the  conditions  were  abso- 
lutely in  defiance  of  the  principles  of  subcutaneous  surgery.  It 
was  done  by  an  open  wound,  and  this  practice  was  continued  with 
hardly  any  modification  till  far  on  in  this  century.  In  fact,  as 
A  dams  points  out,  it  is  from  1831  that  the  commencement  of  scien- 
tific tenotomy  dates,  at  the  hands  of  Stromeyer.  If  this  is  so,  and 
Adams  makes  his  case  out  most  conclusively  (Club-Foot,  1873), 
how  utterly  useless  Hunter's  experiments  on  dogs  must  have  been 
to  lie  forgotten  and  unnoticed  till  unearthed  in  Mr.  Gamgee's 
pamphlet  of  1882,  one  hundred  and  fifteen  years  after  they  were 
performed ;  or  how  singularly  careless  and  inattentive  to  the 
teachings  of  vivisection  the  medical  profession  must  be,  that  they 
should  allow  this  immense  discovery  to  lie  neglected  from  1767 
till  1831. 

To  bring  forward  so  rash  an  illustration  as  this  for  the  value 
of  vivisection  is  to  cast  a  terrible  slur  at  the  profession  of  surgery, 
a  slur  which  I  do  not  think  at  all  deserved  if  the  true  history  of 
such  advances  is  carefully  investigated,  and  the  moving  causes  of 
them  properly  credited. 

Y. — Treatment  of  Aneurism,  Ligature  and  Torsion  of 
Arteries. 

Mr.  Gamgee  alludes  to  the  oft-quoted  story  of  the  Huuterian 
operation  for  aneurism  as  a  proof  of  the  aid  vivisection  has  given 
to  surgery.  This  illustration  has  been  so  completely  and  so  often 
destroyed,  that  it  is  absolutely  unnecessary  to  allude  to  it  further 
than  to  explain  that  Hunter  modified  Anel's  operation  merely 
because  he  found  the  artery  near  to  the  seat  of  disease  would  not 
hold  the  ligature,  and  the  patients  bled  to  death.  As  the  arteries 
of  animals  never  suffer  from  the  disease  in  question,  experiments 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  19 

upon  them  could  not  have  helped  Hunter  in  any  way  whatever. 
Sir  James  Paget,  who  has  lately  appeared  as  an  ardent  advocate 
for  vivisection,  and,  therefore,  may  be  appealed  to  by  me  as  a 
witness  not  biased  to  my  view,  has  recorded  his  opinion  in  the 
Hunterian  oration  given  at  the  College  of  Surgeons  in  181 1,  that 
Hunter's  improvement  in  the  treatment  of  aneurism  "was  not  the 
result  of  any  laborious  physiological  induction ;  it  was  mainly 
derived  from  facts  very  cautiously  observed  in  the  wards  and 
deadhouse."  In  this  opinion  Sir  James  Paget  is  undoubtedly 
correct. 

Concerning  the  tying  and  torsion  of  arteries  I  am  in  a  posi- 
tion to  speak  with  some  authority,  because  I  have  myself  performed 
experiments  on  living  animals,  and  have  found  how  futile  they 
are,  and  how  uncertain  and  untrustworthy  are  their  results.  Mr. 
Gamgee  tells  us  that  some  local  worthies,  who  distinguished  them- 
selves by  early  performances  of  serious  operations,  practiced  their 
'prentice  hands  on  living  animals.  This  is  not  scientific  experi- 
mentation, but  culpable  and  wholly  unnecessary  cruelty.  It  is  on 
the  dissecting  table  that  a  surgeon  prepares  his  hand  for  his  work, 
and  not  on  the  bodies  of  living  animals.  I  have  never  known  nor 
heard  of  such  an  instance  before,  and  I  trust  there  are  no  more  to 
be  quoted.  Any  surgeon  who  did  this  now  would,  I  am  sure, 
receive  a  universal  condemnation  from  his  professional  brethren. 

Mr.  Gamgee  quotes  Jones's  experiments  on  the  arteries  of 
animals  as  an  instance  of  a  valuable  contribution  to  surgical  pro- 
gress by  experiments  on  animals,  and  I  do  not  think  any  more 
complete  illustration  could  be  quoted  in  support  of  the  uselessness 
of  vivisection  as  a  method  of  scientific  research  than  that  of  the 
history  of  the  physiological  and  pathological  processes  to  be 
observed  in  arteries.  If  we  consider  the  question  from  what  some 
would  call  the  purely  scientific  side,  that  is  apart  altogether  from 
any  practical  bearings  it  may  hare  for  the  relief  of  human  suffer- 
ings and  the  cure  of  human  disease,  it  consists  merely  cf  a  mass 
of  observations  in  which  each  observer  contradicts  some  other. 
Upon  this  subject  I  wrote  as  follows  so  long  ago  as  1865: — 

"  John  Hunter  warned  surgeons  to  avoid  injuring  any  of  the 
coats  of  an  artery,  and  to  this  effect  advised  that  the  ligature 
should  not  be  drawn  So  tight  as  to  cut  them ;  while  many  of  his 


20  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

contemporaries  and  successors  dreaded  any  injuries  so  much  that 
they  used  all  sorts  of  clumsy  contrivances  to  avoid  it — such  as 
pads  of  lint  and  bits  of  cork  inserted  between  the  arteries  and 
ligature.  Again,  Travers,  in  his  experiments  on  ligatures  of 
arteries,  demonstrated  that  Jones  was  quite  wrong  when  he  in- 
sisted that  it  was  necessary  to  divide  the  inner  coats ;  and  Mr. 
Dalrymple,  of  Norwich,  proved  by  his  experiments  that  while 
simple  and  continued  contact  of  the  parietes  of  a  vessel,  without 
the  slightest  wound  of  any  of  the  coats  was  sufficient  to  produce 
permanent  adhesion  and  obliteration,  yet  that  division  of  the 
internal  and  middle  coats  without  continued  coaptation  invariably 
failed  to  produce  adhesion.  Hodgson  says  that  he  cannot  sub- 
stantiate Jones's  statement  that  division  of  the  coats  is  essential, 
and  strongly  supports  the  opinion  that  coaptation  of  the  walls, 
without  rupture  of  any  of  the  coats,  will  produce  occlusion.  The 
theories  of  Dr.  Jones  were  strongly  supported  by  Professor 
Thompson,  his  teacher,  but  were  strongly  opposed  by  Sir  Phillip 
Crampton,  who  insisted  that  the  division  of  the  coats  not  only  was 
unnecessary,  but  that  it  frequentlj7  defeats  its  own  object." — 
Medical  Times  and  Gazette,  1865. 

I  quote  this  at  length  to  show  that  fifteen  years  ago  I  found 
authorities  differing  so  much  on  this  scientific  question  that  I 
thought  it  advisable  to  institute  a  new  series  of  vivisectional  ex- 
periments to  decide  it.  The  experiments  performed  by  nryself 
only  added  to  the  confusion,  though  nobody  saw  that  at  the  time. 
What  we  were  working  at  was  to  get  quit  of  the  ligature  altogether, 
and  to  secure  arteries  by  a  temporary  compression  of  some  kind 
without  injuring  the  coats.  Acupressure  promised  to  accomplish 
this;  but  it  failed,  for  reasons  I  need  not  enter  into  here.  The 
desire  to  get  quit  of  the  ligature  was  due  to  the  fact  that  after  a 
vessel  was  tied  one  end  of  the  ligature  was  cut  off  and  the  other 
left  hanging  out  of  the  wound,  where  it  remained  for  weeks,  some- 
times for  months,  and  occasionally  (as  in  Lord  Nelson's  case)  for 
years. 

The  amazing  thing  is  that  with  all  the  expei'iments  made  upon 
animals  nobody  ever  thought  of  cutting  both  ends  of  the  ligature 
quite  short  and  closing  the  wound  over  it.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
from  the  time  of  Ambrose  Pare  to  that  of  Simpson,  an  interval  of 
over  300  years,  we  went  bungling  on  with  experiments  on  animals 
when  the  whole  thing  lay  clear  before  us.  It  was  the  successful 
experiments  of  Baker  Brown,  and  Thomas   Keith  upon  women 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  21 

suffering  from  ovarian  tumors  which  showed  us  that  if  we  use  pure 
silk,  cut  the  ends  of  the  ligature  short,  and  close  the  wound  care- 
fully over  them,  success  will  be  certain.  Yet  not  content  with 
this,  we  hear  of  fresh  experiments  on  animals  with  carbolized 
catgut,  chromicized  catgut,  kangaroo  tendons  and  other  novelties, 
which  speedily  die  out  when  applied  to  human  beings. 

In  the  case  of  the  arteries,  therefore,  experimentation  on 
animals  has  proved  to  be  "  science,  falsely  so  called."  What  we 
have  done  in  this  direction  is  entirely  the  result  of  clinical  expe- 
rience, and  that  only. 

VI. — Transfusion. 

This  operation  was  not  initiated,  as  asserted  by  Mr.  Gamgee, 
in  the  second  half  of  the  seventeenth  century  by  Dr.  Lower,  of 
Oxford,  nor  was  it  first  proposed  as  a  legitimate  surgical  opera- 
tion at  all.  It  was  proposed,  and  in  all  probability  was  really 
practiced,  by  the  alchemists  of  the  sixteenth  century  as  an  attempt 
to  obtain  for  the  wealthy  aged  a  renewal  of  their  lease  of  life, 
after  the  theory  and  legend  of  Faustus.  Certain  it  is  that  allu- 
sions to  it  are  frequent,  though  the  first  actual  account  of  its 
performance  is  given  by  Andre  Libavius,  Professor  of  Medicine 
at  Halle  (Helmst.,  1602),  as  having  been  performed  by  him  in 
1594,  the  blood  of  a  young,  healthy  man  being  transfused  into  a 
man  aged  and  decrepit,  but  able  and  willing  to  pay  for  the  sup- 
posed advantage.  In  the  early  part  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
it  was  a  good  deal  discussed  from  this  point  of  view,  forgotten 
for  awhile,  and  then  after  the  Restoration  it  was  reconsidered, 
and  a  great  deal  written  about  in  this  country  and  on  the  Conti- 
nent. An  extremely  interesting  allusion  to  the  experiments  is  to 
be  found  in  the  wonderful  Diary  of  Samuel  Pepys  . — 

"November  14th,  1666. — Dr.  Croone  told  me,  that  at  the 
Meeting  at  Gresham  College  to-night  (which,  it  seems,  they  no^ 
have  every  Wednesday  again),  there  was  a  pretty  experiment  of 
the  blood  of  one  dog  let  out  (till  he  died)  into  the  body  of 
another  on  one  side,  while  all  his  own  run  out  on  the  other  side. 
The  first  died  upon  the  place,  and  the  other  is  very  well,  and  likely 
to  do  well.  This  did  give  occasion  to  many  pretty  wishes,  as  of 
the  blood  of  a  Quaker  to  be  let  into  an  Archbishop,  and  such  like ; 
but,  as  Dr.  Croone  sa}-s,  may,  if  it  takes,  be  of  mighty  use  to  man's 


22  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

health,  for  the  amending  of  bad  blood  by  borrowing  froni  a  better 
body. 

"16th. — This  noon  I  met  with  Mr.  Hooke,  and  he  tells  me 
the  dog  which  was  filled  with  another  dog's  blood  at  the  College 
the  other  day  is  very  well,  and  like  to  be  so  as  ever,  and  doubts 
not  it's  being  found  of  great  use  to  men,  and  so  does  Dr.  Whistler, 
who  dined  with  us  at  the  Tavern." 


The  scheme  of  transfusion  in  all  the  experiments  of  the 
seventeenth  century  descriptions  of  which  I  have  seen,  was  to 
take  arterial  blood  from  an  animal  and  pass  it  into  the  veins  of 
another,  and  that  this  was  successful  is  not  surprising.  But  this 
has  never  been  attempted  in  modern  times  upon  man.  It  certainly 
would  not  be  justifiable  ;  because,  to  interfere  with  a  large  artery 
— and  a  large  artery  would  be  required — in  a  man  is  always  an 
extremely  risky  thing.  Dr.  Lower,  who  is  Mr.  Gamgee's  authority, 
in  1667  injected  or  tried  to  inject  arterial  blood  from  a  lamb  into 
a  man,  but  the  operation  was  so  badly  clone  that  I  do  not  believe 
any  blood  really  passed.  If  Pepys's  idea  could  have  been  carried 
out,  of  transferring  some  of  the  peaceful  blood  from  the  arteries 
of  a  member  of  the  Society  of  Friends,  for  the  replacement  of  the 
turbulent  and  brutal  spirit  of  Archbishop  Laud,  some  good  might 
have  been  done,  much  of  the  terrible  history  of  that  time  need  not 
have  been  written,  and  I  might  not  have  appeared  here  as  a  critic 
of  such  experiments.  But  no  such  or  any  other  good  result  was 
obtained.  A  large  army  of  experimenters  rushed  into  the  field,  a 
fierce  controversy  took  place ;  but  before  the  eighteenth  century 
dawned  the  whole  thing  was  discredited  and  forgotten.  Mr.  Flint 
South  gives  a  succinct  history  of  the  matter,  and  tells  us  that  it 
was  revived  by  the  plan  of  mediate  transfusion  in  the  early  part 
of  the  present  century.  The  former  experiments  were  fruitlessly 
repeated  and  others  tried.  The  result  is  that  the  operation  has  a 
very  insecure  hold  on  professional  opinion.  I  have  seen  it  per- 
formed seven  times  without  success  in  a  single  instance.  I  have 
twice  been  asked  to  do  it,  and  have  declined,  and  both  patients 
are  now  alive  and  well.  We  hear  a  great  deal  of  cases  in  which 
patients  have  survived  after  ti'ansfusion  has  been  performed,  but 
we  hear  little  or  nothing  of  its  failures.  Personally,  I  have  no 
confidence  in  the  proceeding. 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  23 

YII. — Abdominal  Surgery. 

Mr.  Gamgee  alludes  to  a  vivisection  experiment  made  by  John 
Shipton,  and  published  in  1703,  as  having  laid  the  foundation  for 
the  recent  advances  of  abdominal  surgery,  which  are  attracting 
the  admiration  of  the  whole  professional  world,  and  the  instances 
he  quotes  date  so  late  as  1880.  If  Shipton 's  experiment  has  been 
so  fertile,  why  has  the  crop  been  delayed  for  one  hundred  and 
seventy-seven  3'ears  ? 

But  even  here  Mr.  Gamgee  is  wrong  in  his  history.  The 
whole  progress  of  abdominal  -surgery  dates  from  the  first  success- 
ful case  of  ovariotomy  performed  by  Robert  Houston  in  1701. 
Failing  to  see  the  lesson  taught  by  this,  and  led  astray  by  vivi- 
section, no  further  success  was  achieved  till  1809,  by  Ephraim 
McDowell,  and  it  was  not  till  1867  that  any  substantial  gain  was 
made.  Disregarding  all  the  conclusions  of  experiment,  Baker 
Brown  showed  us  how  to  bring  our  mortality  of  ovariotomy  down 
to  10  per  cent.;  and  again,  in  1876,  Keith  proved  that  it  might  be 
still  further  reduced.  The  methods  of  this  reduction  were  such 
as  only  experience  on  human  patients  could  indicate  ;  experiments 
on  animals  could  and  did  teach  nothing,  for  operations  have  been 
performed  on  thousands  of  animals  every  year  for  centuries  and 
nothing  whatever  has  been  learnt  from  this  wholesale  vivisection. 

As  soon  as  Keith's  results  were  established  abdominal  sur- 
gery advanced  so  rapidly  that  now,  only  six  years  after,  there  is 
not  a  single  organ  in  "the  abdomen  that  has  not  had  numerous 
operations  performed  upon  it  successfully.  I  have  had,  as  is  well 
known,  some  share  in  this  advance,  and  I  say  without  hesitation, 
that  I  have  been  led  astray  again  and  again  by  the  published 
results  of  experiments  on  animals,  and  I  have  had  to  discard 
them  entirely. 

Speaking  of  some  recent  attempts  which  have  been  made  to 
operate  on  cases  of  cancer  of  the  stomach,  Mr.  Gamgee  says : 
"  Warranting,  as  such  cases  do,  the  placing  of  cancer  of  the  stomach 
amongst  diseases  curable  by  the  knife,  do  they  not  also  justify  the 
vivisection  of  dogs  b}r  Shipton  and  Travers,  who,  by  their  experi- 
ments, laid  the  first  scientific  foundation  of  intra-abdominal 
surgery  ?  "  Such  a  statement  as  this  must  be  so  completely 
qualified  as  to  be  regarded  as  altogether  inaccurate.     No  form  of 


24  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

cancer  is  yet  known  ever  to  have  been  cured,  either  by  opera- 
tion or  anything  else.  If  removed  it  invariably  returns,  and  in 
all  these  cases  of  cancer  of  the  stomach  quoted  \>y  Mr.  Gamgee, 
save  one,  the  disease  speedily  returned  and  killed  the  patients. 
The  one  exception  has  not  yet  been  under  trial  long  enough  to 
enable  us  to  give  an  opinion.  Doubtless  it  will  have  the  same 
end  as  the  others. 

VIII. — Function  of  Periosteum. 

The  history  of  the  development  of  our  knowledge  of  the 
formation  and  growth  of  bone  is  exceedingly  interesting,  because 
it  shows  how  completely  misleading  are  the  conclusions  based 
upon  vivisectional  experiments,  and  how  perfectly  the  secrets  of 
Nature  may  be  unraveled  by  a  careful  and  intelligent  examination 
of  her  own  experiments.  No  one  can  look  now  at  a  necrosed 
bone  without  seeing  how  completely  the  whole  story  is  there 
written.  The  history  also  exemplifies  the  fact  that  it  is  not  only 
the  purely  practical  details  of  surgery  which  are  independent  of 
vivisection  for  their  development,  but  what  are  called  the  more 
scientific  developments  of  physiological  knowledge  are  equally 
possible  without  its  aid,  and  are  often  retarded  by  its  misguidance. 

The  first  real  observer  in  this  department  was  Jean  Guichard 
Duverney,  born  in  1648,  who  achieved  such  distinction  that  Peyer, 
in  a  dedicatory  epistle,  sa}rs  to  him,  "  Sempiterna  te  (Duverneyum) 
quondam  trophoea  manebunt  et  Regi  vestro,  Academiag  Urbique 
gloriosum  erit  tantum  aluisse  civem."  He  studied  closely,  and 
wrote  a  great  deal  about  the  anatomy,  physiolog}^  and  surgery  of 
bones,  and  in  his  books  *  he  fulby  describes  the  method  of  growth 
and  ossification  of  bone,  its  dependence  for  its  nutrition  and 
growth  upon  the  periosteum  ;  the  only  thing  he  lacks  is  the  micro- 
scopical knowledge  of  modern  times.  He  also  performed  vivi- 
sections, not  upon  the  periosteum,  but  upon  the  medulla,  and  they 
led  him  into  most  erroneous  conclusions.  He  cut  through  the 
thigh  bone  of  a  living  animal,  and  repeatedly  plunged  a  stilette 
into  the  medulla,  and  the  animal  gave  evidence  of  great  suffering. 
The  marrow,  he  therefore  concluded,  received  a  great  number  of 
nerves,  which  passed  through  the  canals  in  the  bone,  but  which 

*  Traite  des  Maladies  des  Os,  1751,  Paris.  CEuvres  Anatomiques, 
Paris,  1761. 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  25 

existed  only  in  his  imagination.  As  long  as  he  kept  to  his  clinical 
observations  and  anatomical  dissections  he  reached  exact  con- 
clusions, but  as  soon  as  he  entered  the  arena  of  vivisection  he 
went  all  astray. 

The  next  author  of  note  was  Francois  Hunauld,  born  in  1701, 
who  published  in  1730  "Recherches  Anatomique  sur  les  Os  du 
crane  de  l'homme,"  in  which  he  describes  with  the  utmost  accuracy 
the  ossification  by  the  membranes,  between  which  the  cranial 
bones  are  developed.  The  only  errors  he  made  were  hypothetical 
descriptions  of  things  he  could  not  have  seen  without  a  micro- 
scope, and  that  he  evidently  had  not  used. 

Next  comes  Robert  Nesbit,  a  Scotch  surgeon,  settled  in 
London,  who  published  in  1736  an  essay,  entitled  "Human 
Osteogeny,  explained  in  two  lectures  " 

He  was  the  first  to  demonstrate  the  construction  of  bone  by 
the  now  familiar  experiment  of  dissolving  out  the  mineral  matter, 
and  leaving,  as  he  most  accurately  sa}S,  a  spongy  substance  alto- 
gether different  from  cartilage.  Cartilage  he  referred  to  its  proper 
function  ;  but  he  describes  it  as  vascular,  in  this  showing  the  want 
of  microscopical  investigation ;  but  concerning  the  process  of 
ossification  he  had  got  quite  as  far  as  we  have  at  the  present  day. 
He  tells  us  that  in  the  blood,  or  in  a  liquid  separated  from  it, 
there  is  an  ossifying  fluid,  a  fluid  containing  the  material  out  of 
which  bone  is  built  up,  composed  of  parts  which  are  not  sensible: 
that  whenever  Nature  determines  upon  an  ossification  within  a 
membrane,  from  which  all  bones  are  developed,  or  in  a  cartilage, 
she  directs  by  some  means,  the  nature  of  which  we  are  ignorant 
of,  a  larger  quantity  of  blood  to  the  vessels  of  the  membranes,  so 
that  they  become  distended  and  visible,  whereas  before  they  were 
invisible.  He  describes  the  process  of  ossification  only  with  such 
errors  as  are  due  to  the  absence  of  the  microscope,  and  says  : 
"Thus  the  membranes  (periosteum)  and  the  cartilages,  are  the 
reservoirs  in  which  the  osseous  particles  are  deposited  and 
moulded."  He  denied  the  existence  (and  quite  correctly)  of  an 
internal  periosteum,  which  had  become  about  that  time  a  matter 
of  great  contention. 

The  celebrated  discovery  of  the  property  of  madder  for 
staining  growing  bone,  when  used  as  food  by  animals,  was  pub- 
lished by  John  Belchier  in  the   Philosophical  Transactions  for 


26  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

1*136,  and  he  fully  disclosed  thereby  the  method  of  growth  of  bone 
from  periosteum,  and  many  other  most  interesting  and  valuable 
discoveries  concerning  bone. 

Between  1139  and  1*743  Henri  Louis  Duhamel-Dumonceau 
published  eight  memoirs  on  the  growth  and  repair  of  bones,  largely 
based  on  the  suggestive  discovery  of  Belchier.  Up  to  this  time 
the  formation  of  callus  was  thought  to  be  due  to  an  effusion  of 
osseous  juice — a  belief  which  pervaded  the  surgical  teaching  of 
a  distinguished  professor  of  the  University  of  Edinburgh  so  late 
as  my  own  student  days — but  Duhamel  proved  its  real  origin. 
He  also  completely  established  the  fact  that  bones  grow  in  thick- 
ness by  the  addition  of  osseous  layers  originating  from  the 
periosteum. 

Duhamel  performed  many  vivisections,  but  it  is  quite  clear 
from  his  own  descriptions  that  they  were  failures  and  did  not  help 
him.  He  sajs  himself  that  his  conclusions  were  based  on  sections 
which  he  made  of  specimens  of  fractures  which  were  in  the  col- 
lections of  Winslow,  Moraud,  and  Hunauld.  In  fact,  to  any 
intelligent  observer  who  looks  at  a  preparation  of  necrosis  it  is 
evident  that  no  vivisection  was  needed  to  show  the  whole  process 
and  growth  of  repairs  of  bone ;  and  even  if  vivisection  were 
necessary,  history  disphvys  with  certainty  that  Syme  and  Oilier,  to 
whom  Mr.  Gamgee  attributes  the  merit  of  these  discoveries,  were 
only  uselessly  repeating  the  attempts  of  Duhamel  more  than  a 
century  old,  and  were  onby  attempting  to  establish  what  had  long 
before  been  proved. 

Since  Duhamel's  time  thousands  upon  thousands  of  experi- 
ments upon  animals  are  on  record,  some  to  prove  that  the  perios- 
teum has  nothing  whatever  to  do  with  the  formation  of  bone  or 
with  the  production  of  callus,  and  others  to  prove  that  we  owe 
everything  to  the  periosteum,  and  yet  it  has  been  settled  absolutely 
only  by  the  experiments  of  disease  upon  our  own  bodies,  and  not 
by  experiments  on  animals.  It  would  be  really  amusing  to  read 
the  accounts  of  the  researches  of  Sue,  Bordenave,  Delius,  Dethleef, 
Fongeroux,  Haller,  and  countless  others,  were  not  the  humor  of 
their  mutual  contradictions  sadly  marred  by  the  accounts  of  the 
tortures  they  inflicted  uselessly  on  nvyriads  of  animals. 

The  experiments  of  Dethleef  of  Gottingen,  in  1752  were  far 
more  scientific  than  those  of  Mr.  Syme  in  1837,  and  the  conclu- 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  27 

sions  of  both  seem  to  me  to  be  equally  erroneous.  At  any  rate 
Mr.  Syme  did  not  help  us  one  bit  in  advance  of  Duhamel  and 
Fongeroux.  Haller  made  numerous  vivisectional  experiments, 
and  he  was  the  most  distinguished  physiologist  of  his  time,  }-et 
he  records  his  conclusion  that  the  periosteum  has  nothing  what- 
ever to  do  with  the  formation  of  bone,  and  as  a  proof  of  this  he 
quotes  the  formation  of  exostoses  on  teeth.  The  fact  is,  that  as 
long  as  dependence  was  placed  on  vivisection,  so  long  did  one 
experimenter  investigate  after  another  fruitlessly,  and  with  con- 
clusions absolutely  contradictory.  On  pathological  research  alone 
has  the  true  conclusion  been  established.  Haller  made  a  long 
series  of  vivisectional  experiments,  published  in  two  memoirs.* 
and  triumphantly  proved  that  the  periosteum  can  have  nothing  to 
do  with  the  formation  of  bone.  He  concluded  from  his  vast  array 
of  experiments  that  bone  grew  from  the  middle  and  not  from  the 
outside,  together  with  many  other  absurdities,  only  to  be  matched 
in  the  modem  researches  of  Bennet  and  Rutherford  on  the  func- 
tion of  the  liver,  also  based  on  fallacious  vivisections. 

The  whole  of  the  physiology  and  pathology  of  bone  have  been 
laid  bare  by  the  accident  of  the  pigs  of  the  dyer  with  whom  Belchier 
dined,  by  microscopic  research,  and  the  observations  of  disease. 
Yet  Hunter  and  Stanley  thought  it  necessary  to  confirm  the  con- 
clusions of  the  madder  stain  by  such  a  clumsy  device  as  fixing  a 
ring  of  metal  round  the  growing  bones  of  a  young  animal,  letting 
the  ring  remain  for  months  or  years,  and  then  examining  to  find — 
what  ?  absolutely  nothing,  save  that  the  ring  had  been  more  or 
less  covered,  just  as  it  would  have  been  on  a  tree,  thus  only  re- 
peating Duhamel's  conclusions.  Other  observers  bored  holes  in 
bones  and  filled  them  with  metal  plugs  and  shot  to  find  only  that 
the  conclusions  of  disease,  that  long  bones  grow  from  the  epiphyses 
is  absolutely  correct.  Then  we  come  to  Mr.  Syme's  paper  in 
1837,  "  On  the  power  of  the  periosteum  to  produce  new  bone." 
Mr.  Syme  almost  every  week  was  in  the  habit  of  cutting  through 
great  thicknesses  of  new  bone  attached  to  and  growing  from  the 
periosteum  to  get  at  dead  old  bone  from  which  the  periosteum 
had  been  separated  ;  and  the  new  bone,  being  between  the  perios- 
teum and  the  old  bone,  must  of  necessity  have  grown  from  the 
periosteum :  there  was  nothing  else  it  could  grow  from.     There- 

*  "  Sur  la  Formation  des  Os."    Lausanne,  1758. 


28  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

fore,  if  Mr.  Syme  found  it  necessary  to  cut  up  animals  to  find  out 
what  was  constantly  staring  him  in  the  face,  he  was  a  profoundly 
unscientific  surgeon,  whose  researches  were  as  badly  conducted  as 
they  were  useless. 

When  Mr.  Gamgee  read  his  paper  at  the  local  Medical  Society 
and  quoted  these  experiments  of  Mr.  S3rme,  I  said  that,  as  far  as 
I  could  recollect,  the  fact  was  that  their  conclusions  had  been 
absolutely  upset  by  Mr.  Goodsir,  who  did  not  make  experiments 
upon  animals,  but  followed  a  far  more  scientific  method  of 
research — microscopic  examination.  On  refreshing  my  memory  I 
find  this  is  the  case.  In  a  paper  read  before  the  Royal  Society  of 
Edinburgh*  in  answer  to  Mr.  Syme,  Mr.  Goodsir  shows  that  Mr. 
Syme's  method  of  research  was  so  bad  that  the  experiments  could 
not  be  performed  accurately.  Mr.  Sj'me  was  pre-eminently  an 
unscientific  surgeon,  for  he  knew  nothing  of  the  microscope;  in 
fact,  it  may  be  doubted  if  he  ever  looked  through  one.  Mr. 
Goodsir,  on  the  contrary,  may  be  looked  upon  as  the  father  of 
modern  histological  research.  He  proves  conclusively  that  Mr. 
Syme's  experiments  were  absurd  in  their  conception  and  futile  in 
their  application.  Mr.  Goodsir's  conclusions  are,  on  the  contrary, 
uniformly  accepted,  and  as  to  his  method  he  says  that  they  were 
made  upon  shafts  of  human  bones  which  had  died — museum 
specimens,  just  as  Duhamel's  were.  They  showed  that  whilst  the 
periosteum  is  the  matrix  and  machine  by  which  the  new  bone  is 
made,  the  real  agency  is  in  the  layer  of  osteal  cells,  and  so  he 
finally  solved  the  riddle.  He  did  this  by  mici'oscopic  and  patho- 
logical research.  He  condemned  the  employment  of  vivisection 
as  useless  and  misleading,  and  to  him  we  owe  the  completion  of 
Belchier's  and  Duhamel's  research— a  completion  which  was  hin- 
dered for  a  century  by  the  blunders  of  vivisectionists. 

After  this  I  need  not  stop  to  discuss  the  useless  repetition  of 
Mr.  Syme's  experiments,  with  variations  by  Oilier  of  Lyons,  for 
that  would  be  merely  a  waste  of  time. 

IX. — The  Ecraseur. 

Mr.  Gamgee  quotes  the  introduction  of  the  ecraseur  as  an 
instance  of  the  influence  of  vivisection  on  the  progress  of  human 
surgery.     No  more  unfortunate  instance  could  be  quoted.     The 

*  Trans.  Roy.  Soc.  Edin.,  vol.  xiv. 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  29 

principle  of  the  instrument  is  that  it  crushes  and  tears  the  tissues 
instead  of  cutting  them  as  by  the  knife.  The  surgical  aphorism 
that  "  torn  arteries  don't  bleed"  was  in  existence  long  before  M. 
Chassaignac  was  born,  and  if  he  had  based  his  employment  on 
that  alone,  he  could  have  done  all  that  his  iustrument  has  effected. 
But  unfortunately  he  performed  experiments  upon  animals,  and 
immediately  he  was  led  astray.  I  once  saw  the  leg  of  a  favorite 
dog  amputated  at  the  hip-joint  on  account  of  disease,  and  when 
the  limb  was  removed  not  a  single  vessel  bled,  and  the  main 
artery  was  tied  only  as  a  matter  of  precaution.  In  the  human 
subject  I  have  seen  twelve  or  fifteen  arteries  tied  in  the  same  oper- 
ation, for  with  us  the  smallest  arteries  bleed  and  require  to  be 
secured.  Our  arteries  act  in  ways  altogether  different  from  those 
seen  in  the  lower  animals.  Their  pathology  and  physiology  are 
absolutely  different,  as  may  be  seen  in  the  frequency  of  apoplexy 
and  aneurism  with  us,  and  the  almost  complete  immunity  from 
them  of  all  the  lower  animals,  even  in  extreme  old  age.  Hunter 
tried  his  best  to  induce  aneurism  to  the  lower  animals,  and  failed. 
Injuries  to  arteries  in  the  lower  animals  are  repaired  with  the 
utmost  certainty  and  readiness,  but  in  man  it  is  altogether 
different.  It  may  be  easily  imagined,  therefore,  that  M.  Chas- 
saignac's  application  of  the  ecraseur  to  the  lower  animals  was 
found  wholly  misleading  when  man  was  the  subject,  and  now  in 
human  surgery  its  utility  is  extremely  limited  ;  that  is,  it  is 
entirely  confined  to  operations  where  only  very  small  arteries  are 
divided.  Speaking  for  my  own  practice,  I  may  say  that  it  might 
be  dispensed  with  and  never  missed. 

Mr.  Gamgee's  quotation  of  its  application  to  the  ovarian 
arteries  of  the  cow  is  peculiarly  unfortunate,  seeing  that  when  it 
was  used  for  the  same  purpose  in  the  human  subject  it  had 
speedily  to  be  given  up  on  account  of  its  failure. 

X. — Detection  op  Poison. 

A  great  deal  has  been  made  of  the  successful  experiments 
recently  performed  by  the  medical  experts  for  the  conviction  of 
Lamson,  for  that  worst  of  all  crimes,  the  most  unpardonable, 
murder  by  poisoning.  At  first  sight  this  does  seem  a  case  in 
which  experiments  upon  animals  may  be  justified.  Certainly 
anything  and  everything  ought  to  be  done  to  convict  a  poisoner, 


30  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

and  if  nothing  short  of  that  would  do,  I  would  advocate  the  per- 
formance of  a  hecatomb  rather  than  that  such  a  scoundrel  as 
Lamson  should  escape.  So  late  as  a  few  weeks  ago  I  made  a 
reservation  on  this  point  in  my  condemnation  of  vivisection  as  a 
method  of  research,  but  it  seems  to  me,  from  a  closer  considera- 
tion of  the  facts  of  the  case,  that  it  forms  realty  a  very  strong 
argument  for  the  complete  abolition  of  vivisection,  and,  at  the 
same  time,  unfortunately  it  is  a  matter  of  grave  reproach  to 
modern  science. . 

Fortunately  the  conviction  of  a  poisoner  is  almost  certain. 
If  he  is  not  a  doctor  he  commits  the  crime  so  clumsily  that  he 
cannot  escape.  If  he  is  a  doctor  he  must  have  an  interest  in  the 
victim's  death,  is  almost  certain  to  be  in  pecuniary  difficulties,  and 
is  sure  to  have  had  a  bad  character  previous  to  his  gi'eat  crime. 
The  only  difficulty  lies  in  the  proof  of  the  presence  of  the  poison. 
With  all  poisons  but  the  alkaloids  this  is  a  matter  of  such  ease 
that  failure  is  impossible,  and  as  the  alkaloids  are  almost  exclu- 
sively in  the  hands  of  chemists  and  doctors,  the  limitation  of  their 
use  is  very  close. 

The  most  notorious  case  in  which  an  alkaloid  was  used,  or 
supposed  to  have  been  used  by  a  poisoner,  was  that  of  Parsons 
Cook.  The  alkaloid  was  supposed  to  be  strychnine,  and  I  say 
supposed,  because  I  rise  from  the  perusal  of  that  trial  with  much 
doubt  as  to  whether  Parsons  Cook  really  died  of  sti'ychnine 
poisoning.  Certainly  I  cannot  accept  it  as  proved,  and  I  think  if 
the  trial  were  to  occur  now  the  same  evidence  which  convicted 
Palmer  would  probably  break  down.  I  am  perfectly  satisfied, 
however,  that  Palmer  received  substantial  justice. 

In  Palmer's  case  the  principal'  witnesses  for  the  prosecution 
were  the  late  Dr.  Alfred  Swa}*ne  Taylor,  and  the  late  Sir  Robert 
Christison,  certainty  the  greatest  toxicologists  of  this  century. 
Stiychnine  was  not  discovered  in  the  body  of  Cook,  and  Dr.  Taylor 
had  to  admit  that  the  best  tests  then  known  were  insufficient  to 
discover  one  fiftieth  of  a  grain,  and  that  even  half  a  grain  might 
remain  undetected  amongst  food  in  the  stomach.  Palmer  was 
sentenced  to  death  upon  the  27th  of  May,  1856,  and  in  July  of 
the  same  year  a  method  of  chemical  analysis  was  published  by 
Copney  in  the  "  Pharmaceutical  Journal,"  by  which  one  five 
hundred  thousandth  of  a  grain  of  strychnine  could  be  detected 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  31 

with  certainty  after  separation.  In  his  evidence  Dr.  Taylor 
admitted  that  the  experiments  he  had  performed  upon  animals 
with  strychnine  were  practically  worthless  for  any  application  to 
man,  and  in  the  report  of  the  Royal  Commission  of  1816  he  con- 
demned such  experiments,  particularly  those  which  are  directed 
towards  the  discovery  of  an  antidote  to  snake-bite. 

Strychnine  was  discovered  in  1818,  and  was  first  used  as  a 
poison  in  1831,  and  again  in  the  case  of  Mrs.  Sergison  Smith  in 
184*7,  and  it  was  no  new  matter  the  toxicologists  had  to  do  with 
in  the  trial  of  Palmer.  It  must  be  regarded,  therefore,  as  a  matter 
for  deep  regret  that  it  was  not  till  after  the  trial  and  execution  of 
Palmer  that  the  chemistry  of  strychnine  was  exhaustively  exam- 
ined, and  definite  and  certain  tests  for  it  obtained.  At  the  trial 
there  was  a  sort  of  competition  among  the  vivisectionists,  and 
Serjeant  Shee  actually  urged  as  an  argument  for  the  defence  that 
his  witnesses  had  performed  ten  times  more  experiments  to  prove 
that  there  was  no  strychnine,  than  the  witnesses  for  the  prosecu- 
tion had  performed  to  prove  what  never  was  proved,  that  strych- 
nine was  used  at  all.  Yet  in  two  months  chemical  processes  were 
devised  without  the  slightest  aid  from  vivisection,  which  detected 
half  a  millionth  of  a  grain  with  certainty. 

At  the  trial  Professor  Christison  said  that  another  alkaloid 
was  known,  of  a  deadly  poisonous  character,  which  it  was  impos- 
sible to  detect,  but  under  the  judge's  direction  he  refused  to  make 
its  name  known.  There  were  really  many  alkaloids  of  a  deadly 
poisonous  character  at  that  time  quite  well  known,  and  aconitine 
was  one.  The  first  case  to  bring  this  poison  under  notice  as  a 
criminal  agent  was  in  1841,  and  the  notorious  Pritchard  destroyed 
his  victims  with  it  in  1865.  Dr.  Penny  of  Glasgow  resorted  to 
experiments  on  animals  in  order  to  bring  the  crime  home  to 
Pritchard,  and  succeeded.  Yet  I  have  looked  in  vain  for  any 
record  of  a  research  for  a  method  which  will  detect  aconitine  with 
certainty  by  chemical  analysis,  as  strychnine  can  be  detected,  and 
Dr.  Stephenson  admitted  in  evidence  that  there  was  no  such  test. 

I  daresay  such  a  method  will  be  shortly  published,  and  what 
I  desire  to  point  out  is  that  this  discovery  ought  to  have  been 
made  long  ago  in  the  interest  of  public  safetj',  not  only  with  regard 
to  aconitine,  but  with  regard  to  many  other  alkaloids  which  may 
be  used  in  the  same  way,  and  which  cannot  be  discriminated  from 


32  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

aconitine,  even  by  experiments  on  animals.  At  present,  when 
need  arises,  we  must  go  back  to  the  uncertain  method  of  experi- 
menting upon  animals.  But  this  is  not  science,  if  by  that  word 
we  are  to  speak  of  exact  knowledge.  The  very  weakness  of  this 
method  has  led  to  a  serious  infraction  of  the  principles  of  our 
judicial  proceedings,  for  the  Home  Secretary  announced  in  the 
House  of  Commons  only  a  few  nights  ago,  that  the  Government, 
in  a  case  such  as  Lamson's,  could  not  allow  the  proceedings  of  the 
medical  experts  for  the  prosecution  to  be  watched  by  other  experts 
on  behalf  of  the  defence. 

This  is  altogether  unfair,  for  with  such  an  uncertain  and 
inconclusive  method  as  that  of  experimentation  on  animals,  two 
men,  even  if  appointed  by  the  Colleges  of  Physicians  and  Sur- 
geons, and  not  by  the  Treasur}',  may  be  mistaken,  whereas  by 
chemical  or  spectroscopic  analysis  mistakes  are  extremely  unlikely, 
and  the  more  observers  there  are  the  better. 

The  general  conclusion  therefore  is,  that  for  such  purposes 
experiments  on  animals  should  be  entirely  prohibited,  and  that 
an  exhaustive  research  should  at  once  be  undertaken  at  the 
expense  of  the  State,  upon  the  spectrum  and  chemical  analysis  of 
all  substances  which  may  be  used  for  criminal  purposes.  There 
is  no  known  substance  of  constant  character  which  has  resisted 
the  chemists'  effort  to  identify  it  when  it  has  been  properly 
investigated. 

If  all  these  alkaloids  had  been  subjected  to  an  exhaustive 
investigation  as  strychnine  was  after  Palmer's  trial,  there  would 
have  been  no  need  to  revert  to  vivisection  in  order  to  convict 
Lamson,  and  I  do  not  think  it  would  now  be  contended  as  necessary 
for  the  detection  of  a  poisonous  dose  of  strychnine  that  experi- 
ments on  animals  should  be  made.  "Vivisection  in  this  case  is 
therefore  not  the  weapon  of  science,  but  is  the  refuge  of  incom- 
plete work. 

I  have  now  gone  over  all  the  points  urged'  in  favor  of 
vivisection  as  contributory  to  surgical  advance  as  given  in  Mr. 
Gamgee's  pamphlet,  and  with  the  result,  to  my  mind,  of  proving 
that  in  every  instance  the  claim  is  groundless.  Had  I  time  at  my 
disposal  I  could  examine  in  detail  numerous  other  claims  equally 
fallacious.  So  far,  indeed,  as  I  have  already  said,  I  have  not  met 
with  a  single  case  capable  of  substantiation,  not  even  the  most 


Mr.  Lawson  Tait  on  Vivisection.  33 

recent — that  of  Pasteur's  discovery  of  the  prevention  of  zymotic 
diseases  in  domesticated  animals  by  inoculation  of  cultivated  virus. 

In  the  Nineteenth  Century  for  March  will  be  found  an  article 
by  a  well-known  veterinary  surgeon,  Mr.  Fleming,  on  this  subject. 
He  describes  the  ravages  of  such  diseases  as  anthrax,  splenic 
fever,  rinderpest,  swine  plague,  etc.,  amongst  the  animals  which 
form  our  food  supply,  and  I  admit  the  accuracy  of  his  statements. 
Quite  recently  Mr.  Pasteur  has  discovered,  and  his  statements 
have  been  amply  confirmed,  that  the  specific  organisms  which 
form  the  poisons  of  these  diseases,  may  be  so  artificially  cultivated 
as  to  be  capable  of  producing  by  inoculation  a  mild  form  of  the 
original  disease,  which  mild  form  is  largely  protective  from  the 
severe  and  fatal  form  of  the  same  malady.  In  fact  there  is  a  per- 
fect analogy  between  this  discovery  of  Pasteur  and  that  of  Jenner. 

The  argument  is  that  by  their  inoculation  the  zj'niotics  of 
domestic  animals  may  be  stamped  out,  and  the  claim  is  that  it  is 
a  great  advance  brought  about  by  vivisection.  But  on  a  little 
examination  it  seems  to  me  that  both  argument  and  claim  break 
completely  down.  If  it  is  really  an  advance  from  vivisection, 
then  those  who  benefit  are  the  animals  experimented  upon,  and 
that  may  be  legitimate  enough — they  at  least  would  share  largely 
in  the  benefit. 

But  the  case  must  be  examined  from  another  side.  There  are 
some  twenty  zymotics  amongst  our  domestic  animals  to  be 
provided  against.  Are  we  to  have  each  of  them  inoculated  some 
ten  or  twelve  different  times,  each  time  for  a  different  disease? 
The  affirmative  reply  possesses  a  strong  pecuniary  interest  for  a 
veterinary  surgeon,  but  a  practical  man  will  only  smile  at  it. 

But,  to  go  deeper  into  the  question,  we  find  another  and  a 
much  stronger  objection.  Such  a  process  as  protective  inocula- 
tion must  always  be  an  inefficient  and  a  temporary  measure.  To 
take  the  case  of  vaccination  and  small-pox,  it  is  beyond  dispute 
that  vaccination  protects  the  individual  to  a  large  extent  from 
small-pox,  but  it  does  not  protect  the  community — as  may  be 
seen  from  the  ravages  it  is  making  at  the  present  time  in 
neighboring  towns  and  counties.  The  machinery  of  vaccination 
never  can  be  so  perfect  as  to  stamp  out  the  disease,  and  it  must 
be  regarded  purely  as  a  temporary  expedient.  The  real  agent 
for  the  stamping  out  of  small-pox  is  the  machinery  of  a  system  of 


34  Philosophical  Society  of  Birmingham. 

sanitary  police,  such  as  we  have  here ;  and  even  on  the  small  scale 
in  which  we  have  had  it  for  six  years  it  has  worked  marvels.  It 
will  stamp  out  not  only  small-pox  but  every  other  zymotic  at 
the  same  time,  and  by  the  same  measures,  and  then  we  need  not 
trouble  about  vaccination — certainly  it  need  not  be  compulsory. 

But  the  case  is  still  stronger  with  the  lower  animals.  "With 
them,  as  with  us,  civilization  has  introduced  zymotic  poisons, 
which  are  absolutely  unknown  to  the  wild  animal,  and  the  reasons 
are  not  far  to  seek.  In  my  capacity  as  one  of  the  managers  of  a 
large  public  institution,  I  had  recently  to  investigate  the  cause  of 
an  endemic  of  swine  plague,  and  I  found  a  state  of  matters  which 
had  caused  at  the  same  time  typhoid  fever  in  a  human  patient. 

Look  at  the  arrangements  of  an  ordinary  British  farm-yard, 
and  then  believe  that  it  is  a  matter  of  no  wonder  that  rinderpest 
destroys  the  cattle,  and  diphtheria  the  farmer's  children.  The 
animals  spend  their  lives  in  houses  not  lighted  and  not  ventilated, 
or  walk  about  in  a  mass  of  seething  filth,  on  one  side  of  which 
stands  the  farm-house,  every  room  reeking  with  the  stench  of  the 
cattle  yard. 

When  it  begins  to  dawn  on  the  mind  of  the  British  public 
that  all  these  diseases,  both  for  man  and  animals,  are  absolutely 
preventible  by  the  simple  means  of  securing  fresh  air,  pure  water, 
and  abundant  light,  they  will  be  banished.  Meantime  inoculation 
may,  and  probably  will,  prevent  individuals  being  attacked,  but  it 
will  not  stamp  out  the  diseases,  and  it  must  be  regarded  as  really 
a -retrograde  proposal  when  we  have  in  our  hands  the  means  of 
complete  prevention. 

I  hope  I  have  thus  made  it  clear  that  deeply  as  I  feel  the 
strength  of  the  objection  to  the  practice  of  vivisection  upon  the 
various  grounds  I  indicated  at  the  beginning  of  my  paper,  I  urge 
against  it  a  far  stronger  argument  than  these,  that  it  has  proved 
useless  and  misleading,  that  in  the  interests  of  true  science  its 
employment  should  be  stopped,  so  that  the  energy  and  skill  of 
scientific  investigators  should  be  directed  into  better  and  safer 
channels.  I  hail  with  satisfaction  the  rousing  which  is  evident  in 
the  public  mind  upon  this  question,  and  I  feel  confident  that  before 
long  the  alteration  of  opinion  which  I  have  had  to  confess  in  my 
own  case  will  spread  widely  amongst  the  members  of  my  useful 
profession. 


